In this course, you will learn how to build your team, improve teamwork and collaboration, and sustain team performance through continuous learning and improvement. Specifically, you will learn best practices for composing a team and aligning individual and team goals. You will also learn how to establish roles, build structures, and manage decision making so that your team excels. This course will also help you manage critical team processes such as conflict resolution and building trust that have a profound impact on your team’s performance. You will discuss some of the best ways to harness the productive potential of teams while mitigating the risks and traps of teamwork.
In modern organization, most of work is done in teams, yet the results of teamwork are exceptionally mixed. Many teams are poorly designed and structured, fraught with dysfunctional conflict, experience coordination breakdowns and serious motivation challenges. As a result, many teams fail to realize their potential and frequently underperform even individuals working on similar tasks. After completing this course, you will acquire a set of tools and practices that enable you to effectively set up, run, evaluate, and continuously improve your team. Such insights will both make you a more effective team leader but also a standout contributor in team settings.

GL

This course recall knowledge from other modules, maybe worth to include more content about those other modules for participants that are not enrolled in the entire specialization

TM

Jan 27, 2019

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Very good, practical course on leading teams. As an experienced team leader, I got a lot from the course which will help me more effectively lead teams in the future.

From the lesson

Designing Your Team for Excellence

As a team leader, you must determine how best to compose and structure your team. You will need to determine the optimal team size, diversity of team members, values, and goals for the team -- all of which will have a big impact on team dynamics and performance. In this module, you will learn strategies and tactics to design your team effectively.

Taught By

Scott DeRue, Ph.D.

Maxim Sytch, Ph.D.

Transcript

So far we've talked a lot about surface level diversity, demographics, education, functional background. We talked about the impact of different levels of surface level diversity. We had talked about variability on these surface level dimensions, and we also talked about fault lines. Now, what I wanna do is turn our attention to some of these deep level diversity attributes, that people bring with them to the team. They're non observable, but they have huge effects on how your team performs and ultimately how you have to manage that team in order to drive that team's performance, and deliver the level of excellence that you aspire to. The first dimension that we're gonna talk about is personality, personality and teams. And there are lots of different ways to think about and conceptualize personality. The Myers Briggs version of personality is one that many people around the world are familiar with. So I give you that one here as an example, some of you may be INTJs or ENFPs, INFJs. If you're not familiar with the Myers Briggs typology of personalities, you can simply look it up on the internet, Myers Briggs personality dimensions. There's even free assessments that you can take online, that will help you understand where you fall in terms of your personality configuration and you can also do assessments of your team members in terms of where they fall. And it can be a helpful diagnostic just as a conversation tool of, well, I am an INTJ and you're an ENTJ. So, we share a lot of personality to mentions but you're more introverted and I'm more extroverted or a vice versa. What is that mean for how we work together? And so that might be a hopeful diagnostic. Another version of personality is what we call the big five. The big five includes extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, and what we call emotional stability. Susan Cain wrote a wonderful book on extroversion versus introversion called Quiet. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. What she really explained was the spectrum of extroversion and introversion. Extroverted people preferring more stimulating social environments versus introverted people preferring that less stimulating less social environment. And that being a core dimension of this personality and being one of the big five. Conscientiousness, this is really attention to detail or how much you strive for achievement. Would be the more you strive for achievement, the more attention you have to detail, the higher you are in conscientiousness, the less you do those things, the lower you are. Agreeable versus disagreeable. We all know people who are highly agreeable, will go along with pretty much anything and we also know people who are generally disagreeable, that will wanna argue just for the sake of arguing. Same with openness to experience. We know people who are generally open to trying new things, trying new experiences, experimentation. We often know people who are not open to new experiences, they like their routine, for example and then last and certainly, not least is what we call emotional stability. These are the folks that if you're highly emotionally stable no matter how much adversity you face, no matter how much unexpected events come your way, you're able to stay calm, not too positive, not too negative. As opposed to folks who lack that emotional stability or what we often refer to in the personality research world is more neurotic, where depending on the situation the reader, really high or really low, really positive or really negative, and those are the folks that are less emotionally stable. I really prefer the big five typology of personality for thinking about teams. One, because, we can really get our hands around and understand these five dimensions of personality. And there's extensive research validating the importance of each of these dimensions for how individuals perform in organizations. But importantly for this course, how teams perform and how you wanna configure your team with these different personalities, so that you can get the best out of your team. So let's start there, let's first map your team's personality profile. So, similar to what we did with the surface level demographic diversity, I'd like you to map your team members on each of the big five. And so again you may have multiple groups, you may just have one group that you want to focus on, but go through each of your team members. And you don't necessarily have to give them a formal personality assessment, you observe their behavior every day. If you wanna give them an assessment, if you wanna go ask them, perfectly fine. But chances are you at least have some intuitions or you can make some assumptions, about where each of your team members fall, so member a, member b, c, and d. If you have more than four team members, feel free to add to the personality mapping tool here. But for each of these individuals, how extraverted or introverted? How open to experience are they? How conscientious or non conscientious. How agreeable or disagreeable? How emotionally stable or neurotic are they? Do your assessment and then reflect on, how much diversity and personality do I have? Do I have a high level of diversity and personality, or do I have a low level of diversity in terms of personality and then where's my team average on each of these dimensions? If I look across the team, are we on average more extroverted or more introverted? And for each of the big five, do this analysis. Really, think deeply about your individual team members and then come back to me and then I'll share with you some our latest, well I can say cutting edge or search understanding the impact of team personality on things like conflict and ultimately performance in your team

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